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BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Thursday, May 9, 2013 -- The HTML Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today released a First Public Working Draft of the controversial Encrypted Media Extension (EME) specification, despite massive opposition from public interest organizations and members of the public.

W3C CEO Jeff Jaffe also released a
statement
justifying the Working Group's decision. The proposal, which is
supported by the entertainment industry and giants like Netflix,
Google, and Microsoft, would endorse and facilitate use of proprietary
Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) in HTML, and would have a
dramatic impact on streaming audio and video on the Web.

Defective by Design (a project of the Free Software Foundation devoted
to fighting DRM) and a coalition of 26 other organizations publicly
opposed the proposal in an April letter to the
W3C.
Last week, on International Day Against DRM, Defective by Design
delivered tens of thousands of signatures opposing the proposal, and
continues to collect petition signatures at
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5.

Free Software Foundation executive director John Sullivan made the
following statement:

"We and the 26,000 concerned individuals who signed Defective by
Design's petition so far are extremely disappointed in the W3C's
statement today. The situation is actually worse than we thought,
because the W3C now appears to be bizarrely insisting that Digital
Restrictions Management (DRM) is a necessary component of a free
Web. We were under the impression that the standardized Web was meant
to be a structure that mitigated against holders of particular
proprietary technologies bullying Web users and developers, or
extracting royalties from them as preconditions for participation. If
companies want to do such bullying, they can do it on their own time
and their own dime; the W3C should not help them or endorse them. In
this statement, the W3C unfortunately hitches its wagon to the
contentious and frankly irrelevant empirical claim that DRM is key to
what Microsoft during the Vista launch referred to as a 'next
generation content experience.' In adopting the doublespeak of the
Hollyweb, the W3C is betraying the interests Web users have in
experiencing the amazing universe of human culture enabled by the
Internet. Instead, they are backing the desire of Netflix, Google, and
Microsoft, to capture those users in media silos with walls enforced
by proprietary software and criminal law like the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (and similar laws around the world). Despite the W3C's
claim to have listened, we do not feel heard. We will step up our
efforts to stop them from committing this terrible error, including
issuing a comprehensive refutation of this statement's reasoning."

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to
promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and
redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and
use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating
system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free
software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and
political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites,
located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information
about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at
http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.